Marillion Weekend 2009, here i come! Pope Robin Laurén has been registered, i’ll be sharing a crib with Frans Keylard, his brother and a friend of his, and we still have two beds to spare. Anyone want to join in? Oh yes, and the joint has a sauna, of course.
I’ve been waiting for this since… well for quite a bloody number of years anyway!
I just bought and downloaded Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows. Radiohead have been Really Smart about this. They let the user decide how much they want to pay for this. So i paid a nice, round £1.65 (supposedly around 2 €) which includes rhe £ 0.45 “debit/charge” fee. Supposedly you could pay zilch for the download if you wanted to.
The download came as a zip of mp3 files. DRM free. Easy as pie.
And here’s the idea. I’m not a Great Fan of Radiohead. I like the music but i would not have gone and paid full price for the album. And i’m quite sure that for every Great Fan, there are a hundred just like me who wouldn’t shell out a full ten quid for the record but wouldn’t have a problem paying a euro or maybe two for a band they think are allright enough to torrent. So by this very clever business move, they will in addition to the regular customer receive ninety-nine low paying ones. Now once they have the infrastructure in place, the only thing they are paying for are for pushing the electrons. And pushing electrons is cheap, compared to pushing molecules, which is the traditional format of the trade.
Sure enough you can pre-order a boxed CD (”which includes a free download”), which supposedly the Great Fans will go for. I would, if it were Marillion. And here’s the duh of the day. Marillion noted in their latest Web magazine [0] that their next album (codenamed “15″) will only be available from their web site, bypassing the record company and/or distributor [1]. The thing is that whatever they do now, they will be the second ones to Radiohead. Kinda sucks, doesn’t it? [2]
[0] The Web fan club and magazine were named in the early 1980s, after a song of theirs. So no, it’s not the Interwebs, it’s a spider’s webs or the web of contacts you have.
[1] Marillion have made records through their own company for the last few discs. The previous one was distributed by their old record company EMI.
[2] Marillion have an excellent cover of Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees somewhere.
Lucy (official Marillion evangelista) has posted that the next Marillion Weekend will be on the 20th of March 2009 in Holland. Same site as last year, Center Parcs Port Zélande, Ouddorp, Holland.
Marillion is playing in Finland for the first time since the early nineties. Today. In Ruisrock. And i can’t be there. To say that i’m not pleased is an understatement. I hope somebody brings good photos and a review (and the band back to Finland again).
And on an administrative note, this site was away for a while due to a mistake with the DNS settings. Sorry about that.
Whoa. Nyt on hyvä olo. Vincent Ahrend’s (Ährend?) Mainstream-o-meter kertoo että musiikkimakuni Last.FM:n kuuntelijakaartiin verrattuna on 9.46% mainstream. Eniten painoa antaa soitin- ja lauluyhtye Marillion noin seitsemän prosentin mainstream-arvolla. Tulosta nostaa yllättäen orkesteri nimeltä Opeth, jonka painoarvo miltei puolet Marillionista mutta mainstreamiyys melkein 20%. Huh huh! Vähemmän yllättävää on että Rush ja Clash nostaa tulosta, mutta kuinka monta kuuntelee sekä Rushia että Clashia (JJazzin lisäksi)? Arvo taas kunniakkaasti laskee artisteilla Spock’s Beard, Mano Negra sekä The Flower Kings (ja muutama muu akti kuten 5.15 — missä luuraat, Järvinen? — ja Djam Karet).
Koska mainstreamin minimointi on jatsimaista elitismiä (enkä tässä ainakaan tarkoituksella viittaa JJazziin), pitää siis jättää Opeth vähemmälle, minimoida Genesis (myös vanhempi tuotanto), ja komiasti vaan kuunnella Kuha.a ja muita marginaalitaiteilijoita. Nih.
Folks, the Marillion single Thank you whoever you are (video above, unless Wordpress decided to kill my HTML again) is at chart position number ten in UK and the highest new entry on the charts this week.
To keep the momentum (instead of the usual “up like a balloon, down like a tank” routine), if you haven’t bought the single(s), go and do that now.
The Thank You single exists in three versions, so if you’re feeling really freaky (or generous), you can buy more than one and you still get two different b-sides. All versions have the same single edit of Thank You Whoever You Are.
The Blue single is backed with the non-album track Say the word, a trippy little thing that should have been released by some flower-pop band in the summer of love, but instead got released by the hippies of Marillion. We can probably blame h for this one
The Magenta version has the most toys, featuring Most Toys from the Somewhere else album, the non-album-yet-fan-favourite Circular Ride (studio cut, i thinks) and a live rendition of The Wound.
The Green single is a DVD with and has, besides the already mentioned title track, Most Toys, a live and cover version of Toxic (yes, Britney Spears). These are audio-only. Then we have Thank you and Most Toys again, but as love videos. Having Toxic as a video would have been too much :).
There is also a Red version which is an iTunes-only downloadable single with a live Most toys as b-side.
Tämä on nyt sellaista tekstiä että tuskin uskon siihen itsekään. Mutta. Ensi kesän ja syksyn aikana Suomeen saapuvat soittelemahan Marillion, Rush (liput myyntiin maanantaina), Genesis ja Jetro Tull. Hieman kevyempää taidetta tarjoaa vielä Tori Amos. Enää Yes ja Pink Floyd puuttuvat listoilta (ok, sekä Laurie-täti Anderson, Mike Oldfield ja JM Jarre). Ja Fishhän kävi jo.
Darn. The previous post was a bit terse, and a half-drafted update is still open on the terminal at home, so i can’t really update it.
Anyways, despite all technical problems, the new Marillion single See it like a baby was last week’s #1 downloaded single on HMV and 7Digital! Competing with physical media, See it like a baby hit the spot #45 on the UK single charts.
While not making it into the elusive Top40, the position surprised both the UK commerce and media to the point that HMV has listed Somewhere Else on the “hot pre-releases” page and created a Somewhere Else pre-order draw (*) where five happy winners get a “goodie bag” with an exclusive (yeah) t-shirt and a ticket voucher exchangeable for two tickets on any Somewhere Else concert. And there has been media enquiries and even some airplay (omg !-).
(* No purchase necessary, you can also enter by sending a post card — yeah right)
but there they are £3.99 each, with the Magenta+Green or Blue+Magenta bundle for £7.99.
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